Peter Mancall
speaker
124 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2025
last heard 12 Nov
Peter Mancall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Something You Should Know · The Real Story of Thanksgiving - Bonus Holiday Episode · 12 Nov 2025
podcast
So for those first 30 years, we have just these two mentions of it, one by him and one by another colonial observer.
We don't know whether we should fill in the silence and say, well, they did this twice, maybe they were having these sort of things every day, I mean every year.
And there's certainly no annual holiday.
I mean, the idea of an annual holiday wasn't really the way they thought about things.
So how do we read that silence?
I read it as a historian to say, well, they did these things in the early 1620s.
And knowing how they did things, they very likely, you know, sort of had celebrations each time they brought in a harvest.
But did they have a three-day feast and did it involve their native neighbors?
That seems less likely.
When the people that become Americans and call themselves Americans, that is, people who become residents of states in the late 18th century decide to have days of Thanksgiving, that had nothing to do with what had happened in the early colonial period.
It's not linked to a harvest celebration.
It's not linked to sitting down with Native peoples.
It's really we have endured this terrible moment.
We have come through.
We have survived.
Let us give thanks to God.
Let's have a day of thanksgiving.
Let's have a day of public acknowledgement of God.
The holiday, when it becomes a holiday in the middle of the 19th century, in the middle of the Civil War...
is really a result of people coping with an extraordinary catastrophe, the worst warfare that, as far as we know, we've ever seen in much of North America.
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